John Cameron Mitchell Quotes

I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

Art is eternal, but life is short.

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

Glory comes too late, after one as been reduced to ashes.

You've gotta know what death is to know life!

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?